How could the guy who discovered gems like this now be accused of research fraud????

… because school administrators with fake degrees usually look for jobs in nowheresville sorts of places, and Wasser managed to become (until he was found out) superintendent of a large New Jersey school district. Doc Pendley, who came to the wee Columbia California school district burnishing a LaSalle University degree (the LaSalle scam operated out of Louisiana before its operator went to prison), is far more typical.

Pendley’s bullshit degree is only the beginning of Columbia’s problems.

Pendley and the Board of Trustees have faced criticism within the past several months for their handling of a May 2010 criminal incident involving Pendley’s 24-year-old son, Brennan, who worked as an after-school aide at Columbia Elementary.

Brennan pleaded guilty in June of last year to having sex with a minor, then an eighth-grader, in a classroom.

Since then, comment at district board meetings has centered on John Pendley’s hiring of his unqualified son for the job…

… designed to rope naive people in to taking over-priced courses at lousy schools. If you like the idea of subsidizing for-profit colleges as they engage in their scandalous recruiting practices, read no further.

The rest of us should find it pretty heartening that a bill just introduced in Congress “would prohibit colleges of all kinds from using dollars from federal student assistance programs, including the GI Bill, to pay for advertising and recruiting.”

A sponsor of the bill, Tom Harkin, “emphasized the proposal would leave schools free to advertise — just from a separate pot of money that hasn’t come from taxpayers.”

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And, you know, we’ve been lectured endlessly by the for-profits about letting markets work… So I guess they’re okay with this? Free market, that’s what they’re about, not like the wimpy non-profits! One look at for-profit management compensation will tell you the free market’s working just fine for them. The prez of Harvard makes like, what, around a million dollars. It’s typical for heads of for-profit colleges to make ten million or more. Some of them make much more.

But no – they’re pissed about the legislation! Not only should practically all of their revenue come from the government (not much of a free market model when you think about it, huh?), but they should be free to do fuck-all with our money.

A New York Times article notes the alarmingly high rate of retractions for articles in scientific journals.

… [The] scramble to publish in high-impact journals may be leading to more and more errors. Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent

Greg Mortenson, already in trouble for having apparently made up parts of his best-selling books about establishing schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, must now repay his charity a million dollars — money he is said to have used for personal expenses.

… since scientists pointed out the fraudulence of Yoshitaka Fujii’s work? A decade during which scads of his bogus articles about anesthesia appeared in all the major journals in the field?

180 of his articles are currently under investigation for faked data. 180! And all the time people were trying to get someone – anyone – to pay attention.

[One of the whistle blowers] wrote to the FDA, its Japanese counterpart and the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists to warn them about Dr. Fujii’s results — but received either no reply or a cursory acknowledgment of his concerns.

Scott Reuben, Joachim Boldt, Fujii – what is it about anesthesiologists? Are they in a permanent state of twilight sleep?

… to some extent at most American medical schools, UD says they should turn their attention to corporate ghostwriting of articles and books for university researchers.

AMSA’s simple expediency of publishing COI rankings for each school has shamed many institutions into taking more seriously not merely specific practices like free drug samples and the constant trolling of campus by pharma sales people, but also disclosure in general, as in how much pharma money this or that professor pockets.

The widespread scandal involving professors claiming publications in the scientific literature which have in fact been written, in whole or in part, by ghostwriting firms paid by pharmaceutical companies, is much talked about. But professional organizations and editorial boards – both almost completely dependent on revenue from drug firms – will never do anything about it. Universities don’t care. Only independent groups like AMSA can get anywhere on this one.

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We can expect resistance to all of these changes. UD anticipates a new organization emerging called PharmFee.

K-12 and university online for-profit education – always an incredibly trashy business model – is collapsing left and right as people and states begin to realize that their education taxes are going to the schools’ CEOs and advertising budgets, while the dupes the schools talk into enrolling are dropping out (“these [K-12] cyber schools might as well have a turnstile as their logo for the volume of withdrawals they experience”). Cyber university students get the added benefit of dropping out burdened with huge loan repayments.

Kaplan’s closing a Florida campus “that opened to great fanfare two years ago, but quickly lost students after a federal investigation raised questions about its admissions practices.”

Boohoo! But see that’s the business model there – you take in anyone with a pulse and syphon off all the tax dollars they come with and then … fuck them! You got their money. They can twist slowly in the wind.

You want to understand this business model? Read Glengarry Glen Ross.

Now investors are pissed because word’s out about the utterly shitty education on offer and how all the students are dropping out and all.

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But why are people so obtuse when it comes to understanding how markets work? You set up a tax-syphoning enterprise. You take most of the money that pours in for yourself and your investors, and you set aside some dollars for blitz advertising (you need a steady flow of money-bodies). Oh, and you devote a bit to greasing the hands of politicians.

With the seventy five cents or so left over you hire a teacher to handle hundreds of students per class… Maybe some faceless unqualified drudge in India… Much cheaper to outsource…

Oh, but here come headlines like EDUCATION ON THE CHEAP and articles predicting that “these companies probably won’t have much luck if they continue to offer shoddy educations while raking in profits.”

So now you’re kind of tinkering with the business model. Your basic philosophy – take the money and run – hasn’t altered, but there are many things you can do around the edges to look respectable enough to continue to attract investors and student dupes.

UD has confidence in you. This is only a temporary setback.

A special report on Duke University’s enthusiasm for Anil Potti.

… bask in it.

Who wins? Nice plot twist: The professor!

For six years, Claremont McKenna’s dean of admissions added ten to twenty extra points to the school’s SAT scores. He has resigned.

… the research fraud beat goes on. Diederik Stapel and Dipak Das share a protocol: Just make the shit up.

So you’ve hired a guy who “had very poor writing skills” and doesn’t come to work much at all, spending most of his time in bars and at Disneyland. His time cards are fraudulent. He’s supposedly a fancy engineer working on your top secret satellite stuff under contract with the government, but you’re aware that he’s seldom there.

This paragon tells you he has a doctorate from Oxford University. He’s actually only a high school graduate; and, you know, he certainly doesn’t act like a person with a doctorate from Oxford. But you believe him because, as Ms Keeton up there says, you lacked the way sophisticated methods of verifying university degrees that we all, in a more enlightened time, now enjoy…

What? The guy worked for you from 2003 to 2008. The telephone (Pick it up. Call Oxford University. Or email Oxford University.) had already been invented. The method of verifying educational claims way back then was the same as it is now. Call the registrar. Or contact the British equivalent of these people. It’s not satellite science.

Ah, but Aerospace Corporation

was culpable [it just paid 2.5 million to settle Justice Department fraud allegations] because it knew that Hunter was not working the hours he submitted on his time card… The company profited from its employment of Hunter because it billed the government a higher hourly rate than it paid him…

Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

And you might ask – Is it such a big deal that Yale’s football coach wasn’t a candidate or a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship, as he has claimed?

Well, yes. Especially at academic institutions, fake degrees, falsely claimed degrees, faked credentials, falsely claimed honors — these are almost as destructive to a school’s reputation as its sports program.

The president and dean of instruction at Bishop State in Alabama both have diploma mill degrees, which makes the place a laughingstock. A university run by people unable to graduate from universities … People running around calling themselves doctors when they’ve pressed a BUY YOUR DEGREE NOW button on their computer… It maketh a mockery of all aspiration to institutional seriousness.

The Yale thing is of course much paltrier; but the principle’s the same: You need to be legit.